


Like Gold

by theremin



Category: Cobra Kai (Web Series), Karate Kid (Movies)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-02
Updated: 2021-02-02
Packaged: 2021-03-13 22:01:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,127
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29160852
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theremin/pseuds/theremin
Summary: Johnny wants, and gets, a new sensei.
Relationships: Daniel LaRusso/Johnny Lawrence
Comments: 37
Kudos: 147





	Like Gold

Daniel's hand was warm and tentative in Johnny's hair, petting, like Johnny was a horse he was a little shy of. “It's so nice,” he said, a little wonderingly, in that cocky, deceptively deep, unmistakeably New Jersey voice. “yeah, it's pretty. It's like gold. Especially when the sun shines on it.”

“You're crazy.” Johnny was pale and his skin was prone to blush. So he tried to avoid embarrassing situations. Unfortunately, the whole last month had been pretty much only embarrassing situations.

“I mean it though,” Daniel said. He wasn't sure when he'd stopped thinking of him as LaRusso. But he was Daniel now, two long smooth syllables that fit just right in his mouth. But a month ago? A month ago he was still LaRusso.

*

It started like this: Johnny Lawrence, standing outside a simple looking gate, leading to a house which he knew was registered to the only man by the name of Miyagi he had been able to find in the phone book.

To Johnny, Cobra Kai had not been about cheating, not been about fighting dirty. It had been about strength. It had been about winning. He was supposed to win that championship because he was the best, the strongest. And he'd lost. To someone so tiny he was pretty sure he could fit him in a mailbox if he tried hard enough. And he'd watched LaRusso's sensei wipe the floor with his brick shithouse of a sensei. Johnny wasn't going on any honor roll any time soon but even he could see there were things he could learn in the old man's Japanese garden. Now he only had to find the courage to knock.

“If you want to come in, you have to go through gate.”

Johnny jumped, and turned to see sensei Miyagi standing behind him, looking up at him with twinkly eyes. He started stammering, trying to explain. 

Sensei Miyagi walked past him, opened the gate and walked inside. Then he turned. “You coming, or what?”

Johnny waited a beat, then followed inside, cleared his throat. “Um, mr, sir, I came here to ask you, respectfully-”'

“What's he doing here?” 

And there was LaRusso, arms crossed over his skinny chest, the same lotus hachimaki around his head, heavy bottom lip pulling his mouth open, eyes staring daggers. They must have been mid-training. Johnny nodded at him. 

“He guest,” sensei Miyagi said. “get more tea.”

LaRusso gaped. “Mr Miyagi, this guy-”

“You like tea?” sensei Miyagi asked, turning to Johnny. He didn't really, it tasted like hot pond water to him. He nodded again. “One more cup, Daniel-san.”

LaRusso rolled his eyes, but stalked off inside.Sensei Miyagi swept a hand out and Johnny sat down in the lawn chair he had indicated. 

“Uh, I wanted to come and say thank you, sir, for helping me out, after the uh, tournament...” 

“You're welcome,” sensei Miyagi said.

“And uhh, I guess I wanted to ask. Um...”

“All right, here's your tea,” LaRusso said, coming back out, handing him a mug full of green leaves and tepid water. 

Johnny sipped it. Gross as fuck. “Delicious, thank you,” he said.

“Mr Lawrence has question,” sensei Miyagi said, tilting his head. “Miyagi listen.”

“Yeah uh.” Johnny took a deep breath. “I wanted to ask if I could train at your dojo, sensei.” He bowed his head.

“What? No!” LaRusso protested. “Mr Miyagi, you can't trust this guy! He's a jerk. You know what he's ca-”

Sensei Miyagi waved a hand and LaRusso shut up. It was satisfying to watch, and Johnny hoped to God sensei Miyagi would teach him that move first.

“You are welcome to practice here.”

Johnny's mouth twitched into a smirk. “Thank you sensei.”

“No. No sensei,” Miyagi said, got up. 

“I don't um- I don't understand?” 

“Daniel-san will teach you.”

*

Even though LaRusso had loudly protested and Johnny had argued, sensei Miyagi hadn't budged. So Johnny had left, giving up on the idea. He'd gone back to the house, huge and empty (his mom and stepdad were in Acapulco) and looked up at the ceiling. Thought about maybe just going out. Getting drunk. Then he'd thought some more. And some more. Until he'd fallen asleep. The next day he'd gone back to the house, and LaRusso had been ready. Kind of indignant, but ready. The old man had probably done some convincing in the meantime. And a sort of training had started. LaRusso had asked him to wax his car, a gorgeous, yellow, classic Ford. Johnny had rolled his eyes but he could respect a good hazing. Plus he genuinely admired LaRusso's car, so he'd done it. Shining it up nice until LaRusso had come over, shook his head.

“Not like that, like this.” He made a kind of circular motion.

“Wax your own damn car if you don't like the way I do it.”

“Get out of here and leave me alone if you don't wanna do it my way.”

Johnny had grit his teeth together and stopped his up-and-down motion and started sweeping to the left instead.

“No-” LaRusso had come over then, put a hand over his, moved it in a circle. “wax on,” he said, gently, “and then the other hand,” he moved to Johnny's other side, put his hand over his other hand and made a concentric circle. “wax off.”

“Okay, got it,” Johnny said, staring stubbornly ahead, shoulders tight.

“All right, I'll come check up on you later.”

Johnny didn't look after LaRusso. His face felt like it was on fire, and he was pretty sure it looked like it, too.

*

It made sense, after a while. Get certain movements down, do them with precision and resistance until they become part of your body vocabulary, and then put then in another context, make a different connection. It was smart, whimsical. Funny. And it worked, too. When LaRusso had finally invited him to train one on one, he'd been keyed up and ready to send the little twig flying into the koi pond, but LaRusso evaded him, quick, elegant, and he taught him the tenets of Miyagi-do. Honestly, he wasn't a great teacher. He was especially shaky on the philosophy - he kept apologizing, second-guessing himself, sometimes going “uh. Excuse me” and running off to verify whatever he was about to say with sensei Miyagi. But he wasn't a bad sparring partner. Tactile, demonstrative and impatiently jerking Johnny's arms into the exact right position. It was a whole new way to think about karate, not to just bulldoze your opponent but to respect him, anticipate him. Johnny wouldn't have minded if he and LaRusso had sparred all summer long, but LaRusso had other ideas. He wanted to do kata, all these slow, synchronized movements together, Johnny felt like a fucking idiot but he couldn't deny the fact it felt kind of good too, as soon as he managed to actually let go, stop being embarrassed by it, when it stopped feeling too much like they were dancing or something. Or something.

LaRusso liked to talk. Sometimes Johnny would just let the chatter wash over him, use it as ambiance. Sometimes he fantasised about tying LaRusso's hachimaki over his mouth. But then sometimes he'd actually respond. Like when LaRusso told him his mom was over in Fresno, looking after an elderly relative, and he was staying in sensei Miyagi's guest house. 

“My parents are away this summer too,” he said. 

“Oh,” LaRusso said. “is someone staying with you?”

“Don't be an idiot. I'm eighteen, I don't need a babysitter.”

After that, sensei Miyagi started inviting him to stay for dinner. When he struggled with the chopsticks, LaRusso took his hand, put his fingers into place around them.

*

It was weird, the touching. Like, yeah, okay, karate is by its very nature a contact sport, but Kreese certainly never touched him like LaRusso did. (Thank god.) He started worrying at it, like a puppy with a rag, and the equation ate up more and more of his brain space, and he started adding other factors – the sensuality of the kata, the intensity of LaRusso's gaze, he had these soulful brown eyes that could heat you up like the sun – and the solution he came up with was this: LaRusso wanted him to kiss him. Which, of course, was super messed up, and he almost dismissed it out of hand right away, but the more he thought about it the more sense it made. It could be nothing else. LaRusso was clearly gagging for it, the little fairy. And the more he thought about it, the more he decided the very decent thing to do would be to throw the guy a bone. So to speak.

So he leaned in one night in the guest house they were sitting shoulder to shoulder and LaRusso was chattering about something or other and he pressed his lips to LaRusso's for a couple of sweet seconds before there was a thud and that thud was the back of LaRusso's head, hitting the wall, and Johnny was genuinely surprised at LaRusso's surprise, wholly unprepared for the possibility his theory might have been wrong.

“Sorry,” he said.

“No no uh. Uh. Wow? I didn't, um. I didn't. Think.”

“I should get going.”

“No, no, don't, come on.”

And then there the hand was again, circled around Johnny's wrist, and when Johnny leaned in the second time he made it slower, gave warning, and when he looked at LaRusso's mouth the tip of his pink tongue came out to wet his lips. 

When Daniel LaRusso's tacky lips closed and pressed over Johnny's mouth, Johnny raised a hand, more by habit than anything, to rest on Daniel's chest, and he could feel the jackhammer of his heartbeat all the way through his thin undershirt, and Johnny thought, _I was right._

Training kind of took a backseat after that. 

Daniel started spending time at Johnny's house. Daniel cooked them spaghetti with tomato sauce, he fried hamburgers and eggs, singing loudly and badly along with the radio. He sat in the V of Johnny's legs with his back against Johnny’s chest, mashing the “fire” button on the joystick while Johnny steered the little spaceship in Zaxxon on the Atari. They sparred in the garden, both of them kicking more than punching, relentlessly targeting ankles and knees with the transparent goal of toppling the other and pinning him to the ground. For the first time in his life, Johnny didn't mind losing.

*

The sunbed was really too narrow for the both of them, but they made it work, Daniel's long skinny shape pressing up into Johnny, his head resting in the crook of his arm and one hand on his chest. He slid the hand up Johnny's neck and cradled the back of his head when he turned to look at him.

Daniel's hand was warm and tentative in Johnny's hair, petting, like Johnny was a horse he was a little shy of. “It's so nice,” he said, a little wonderingly, in that cocky, deceptively deep, unmistakeably New Jersey voice. “yeah, it's pretty. It's like gold. Especially when the sun shines on it.”

“You're crazy.” 

“I mean it though,” Daniel said. “that's what I think.”

“Okay, Daniel,” Johnny said, leaned in with a little smirk and Daniel practically melted into the kiss, inhaling softly when he parted his lips to take Johnny's tongue.

“What in the fuck is this?” a male voice had cried out, and Johnny had pushed away so hard he'd fallen off the sunbed and onto the ground. His stepdad had threatened to send him off to military school, and that had been the end of that.

*

All in all, it hadn't been long. They'd been enemies for longer than they'd been friends, friends for longer than they'd been lovers. It had been barely a week of long sultry kisses and Daniel's subpar cooking and thin tan legs slung over his lap and Johnny for the first time voicing his dream to be the next Chuck Norris and one warm, frantic night where they didn't stop reaching for each other until the sun rose in the morning sky. So when they finally talked again, thirty four years later, Johnny really didn't expect Daniel to acknowledge it. The majority of their relationship had been defined by enmity, and it had ended badly. He pulled away from the bro hug, the artificial chumminess of his chatter (boy, did he ever find his calling). For a moment, Johnny wondered whether those days had been real at all, or some kind of intense, mortifying dream he had confused with reality, some sort of punishment from his subconscious.

Then Daniel said, “You still got those golden locks,” and Johnny felt on fire.


End file.
